If this is its true interpretation, the provision contains no declaration of "sovereignty" over the natural rights of the people.
Justice is "the supreme law" of this, and all other lands; anything in the constitutions or laws of any nation to the contrary notwithstanding. And if the constitution of the United States intended to assert the contrary, it was simply an audacious lie--a lie as foolish as it was audacious--that should have covered with infamy every man who helped to frame the constitution, or afterward sanctioned it, or that should ever attempt to administer it.
Inasmuch as the constitution declares itself to have been "ordained and established" by
We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity,
everybody who attempts to administer it, is bound to give it such an interpretation, and only such an interpretation, as is consistent with, and promotive of, those objects, if its language will admit of such an interpretation.
To suppose that "the people of the United States" intended to declare that the constitution and laws of the United States should be "the supreme law of the land," _anything in their own natural rights, or in the natural rights of the rest of mankind, to the contrary notwithstanding_, would be to suppose that they intended, not only to authorize every injustice, and arouse universal violence, among themselves, but that they intended also to avow themselves the open enemies of the rights of all the rest of mankind. Certainly no such folly, madness, or criminality as this can be attributed to them by any rational man--always excepting the justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, the lawmakers, and the believers in the "Divine Right" of the cunning and the strong, to establish governments that shall deceive, plunder, enslave, and murder the ignorant and the weak.
Many men, still living, can well remember how, some fifty years ago, those famous champions of "sovereignty," of arbitrary power, Webster and Calhoun, debated the question, whether, in this country, "sovereignty" resided in the general or State governments. But they never settled the question, for the very good reason that no such thing as "sovereignty" resided in either.